Advisory board

Our Advisory Board is made up of representatives from our partner organisations and others. Its role is to provide strategic direction and expert advice to inform, shape and share the CSA Centre’s work.

Ian Dean

Interim Chair

Ian has led on children's social care policy for the Local Government Association for the past three years, working closely with councils across the country to support, promote and improve local government children's services.

The LGA is a politically-led, cross-party organisation, which aims to influence and set the political agenda on the issues that matter to councils, so they are able to deliver local solutions to national problems. Prior to this, Ian spent seven years as Policy Officer and then Manager of the London Safeguarding Children Board where, among other responsibilities, he oversaw production of tailored guidance and research on issues including child sexual abuse and exploitation.

Jan Pickles OBE

Jan Pickles is an experienced social worker and has worked in the third sector, the probation service, the police, government and the NSPCC. Jan is a member of the National Independent Safeguarding Board of Wales and a non-executive Director for an NHS Trust.

Jan led the development of the multi-agency risk assessment conference (MARAC), which makes adults and children who experience domestic and sexual violence and abuse safer. In 2015, Jan led a large scale DfE Improvement Programme on Serious Case Reviews. While Assistant Police & Crime Commissioner for South Wales Police, she also lead a review of CSE,

Lisa cooper

Lisa initially qualified as a dietitian in Edinburgh and has worked in a number of executive director and board level NHS roles, where safeguarding has been a key part of her portfolio. She graduated from Chester University with an MBA (Distinction) and is also a Nye Bevan Leadership Graduate.

Lisa is committed to ensuring that all health staff, irrespective of their role, demonstrate leadership and commitment across the wider safeguarding partnership to listen to children and young people and improve health services as a result. Lisa is passionate about ensuring that the voices of children and young people are heard and listened to by all health staff and champions this throughout her work.

Lisa is currently the Chair of NHS England’s National Child Sexual Exploitation Sub-Group and Regional Lead for Safeguarding across NHS England North.

Prof Simon Hackett

Simon Hackett is Professor of Applied Social Sciences and Principal of St Mary’s College, Durham University. He has been involved in the field of safeguarding for 25 years as a practitioner, manager and researcher.

He has written extensively on professional practice with children and families, professional assessment and decision making, adoption of children, and particularly on the subject of child sexual abuse, harmful sexual behaviour in childhood and sexual offending. His recent research includes a large randomised control trial of interventions for children who have been sexually abused, with Professor John Carpenter of the University of Bristol. Simon is Chair of the National Organisation for the Treatment of Abusers (NOTA) which is a national child protection charity working to prevent sexual abuse by improving responses to adults who have sexually offended or children who have displayed harmful sexual behaviours. Simon is the author of five books and a wide variety of other book chapters and journal articles, including the recent book ‘Children and Young People with Harmful Sexual Behaviours’ published in 2014 by Research In Practice.

Prof Sarah Brown

Professor Brown has been conducting research related to sexual aggression for over 20 years. She has been working at Coventry University since 1999 and is currently the Deputy Executive Director of the Centre for Research in Psychology, Behaviour and Achievement.

Professor Brown is the Vice-Chair of the National Organisation for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers (NOTA) and is Associate Editor of Child Abuse and Neglect. She is also a member of the Editorial Board of Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment and the Journal of Sexual Aggression having been the Editor of the latter journal from 2008 to 2014. Professor Brown’s research has focussed on the characteristics of perpetrators of sexual and intimate partner-violence. With colleagues in Australia, she has investigated the contexts and circumstances of perpetrators first sexual offences and most recently the impact of programmes for adolescents aimed at reducing offending on future victimisation.

Prof Julie Taylor

Julie Taylor [PhD; FRCN; RN; MSc; BSc (Hons)] is a nurse scientist specialising in child maltreatment. She is Professor of Child Protection in the School of Nursing at the University of Birmingham, in partnership with Birmingham Women’s and Children’s Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.

Julie’s work is at the leading edge nationally and internationally in reframing child maltreatment as a public health concern. Her research programme is concentrated at the interface between health and social care and is largely underpinned by the discourse of cumulative harm and the exponential effects of living with multiple adversities.

Prof Todd E Hogue

Professor Hogue is a registered Forensic and Clinical Psychologist. He started his career in the British Prison Service working mainly with sexual offenders.

He organised the original national staff training for the implementation of the SOTP programme in the UK. He worked in a community treatment programme for sexual offenders and a secure residential setting for adolescents before moving to Rampton Secure Hospital where he developed specialist services for individuals with a personality disorder. Initially this was through leading the psychology input into developing a specialist Personality Disorder Service and then as Lead Psychologist on the Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder (DSPD) and the development of the Peaks (DSPD) Unit at Rampton Hospital. In 2006 he moved to an academic role as Professor of Forensic Psychology at the University of Lincoln and is currently Programme Lead for the MSc in Forensic Psychology.

Most of his career has been in applied practice and his main research interests are focused on practice based issues. His PhD research focused on the development of a self-report measure of denial in sexual offenders. During the early SOTP training he became interested in staff attitudes and developed the Attitudes Towards Sexual Offenders (ATS) scale which is still actively being used. His current main areas of research are:

attitudes towards sexual offenders and the extent to which attitudes impact on risk perception, clinical judgement and social policy,

the development of new methods of measuring sexual interest / deviant interest using implicit methodologies such as eye-tracking and touch technologies and

evaluating the effect of applied practice initiatives on offender care and reoffending.

Sharon Stratton

Sharon Stratton is the Policing Standards Manager for Vulnerability and Public Protection for the College of Policing, specialising in areas including rape, domestic violence, child sexual exploitation and abuse, stalking, trafficking, managing offenders, etc.

Working closely with the National Policing leads, the Home Office and service providers for public protection, she is responsible for developing effective training, professional standards and the evidence base for all UK policing relating to public protection matters.

She is a retired Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) officer. During her 31 years service, mostly as a detective, she specialised for many years both operationally and strategically in public protection matters predominantly domestic abuse, child protection, honour based violence, stalking and sexual offending. She has spoken at many UK and international conferences on the UK policing response to public protection matters and delivered training on related matters across a variety of agencies.

She was part of the ‘Expert Panel’ convened to develop the DASH risk model and sits on the Home Office Quality Assurance panel for Domestic Homicide review.

She is co-author of a book entitled ‘Policing Domestic Violence’ published by Oxford University Press in November 2008 (under revision) and wrote a commentary for the ‘Handbook of Sexual Violence’ Routledge, 2011. She recently received an award at the College Domestic Abuse Champions Event, for her work in domestic homicide prevention.

Mike Britton

Mike Britton is the staff officer of Chief Constable Simon Bailey, the National Police Chief lead for Child Protection & Abuse Investigation.

Mike works nationally with partners to ensure the law enforcement response to Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse is coordinated, coherent and collaborative. Mike works closely with central government, third sector organisations and police leaders to develop the response to CSEA including prevention.

Zlakha Ahmed MBE

Zlakha Ahmed founded and is currently the CEO of Apna Haq, a survivor-led organisation that supports black and minority ethnic (BME) women and girls in Rotherham, South Yorkshire who are experiencing any form of violence. She has over 30 years of experience developing and overseeing violence against women support services at a local level, while influencing strategy, policy and procedure at a regional, national, European and global level.

Zlakha specialises in community development work with women and girls from BME communities. She was awarded an MBE for services to women’s rights & community cohesion in 2016. She was one of the NICE (National Institute Of Clinical Excellence) committee members who developed the NICE Domestic Violence standards. Zlakha is currently a board member for National Women’s Aid, Just Yorkshire (a human rights civil liberties organisation) and WeRise (a Muslim Women’s empowerment initiative).

Dianne Whitfield

Dianne Whitfield is the Co-Chair of Rape Crisis England and Wales (RCEW), and is the Chief Officer of Coventry Rape and Sexual Abuse Centre (CRASAC) which is one of the largest Rape Crisis centres in the country. She also sits as a Non-Executive Director on Coventry and Warwickshire Partnership NHS Trust.

Previously Dianne worked with a range of public sector organisations including working for a number of years as a management consultant specialising with working with NHS organisations and its strategic partners before training as a gestalt therapist and joining the sexual violence specialist voluntary sector. Dianne has worked for a substantial period in the field of sexual violence, in a variety of different roles, and has significant experience of working at a strategic level, having advised national organisations such as the IPCC and participating on national groups such as the All Part Parliamentary Group on Sexual Violence, and the National CPS/ACPO Scrutiny Groups as RCEW’s representative.

Dianne continues to work as a Gestalt therapist with survivors and victims of sexual violence including child sexual abuse.

We are developing governance arrangements in Wales with key stakeholders and will update this information once they are in place.

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